Somebody please do the math which shows the global delta of CO2 related arch vs Ubuntu bloat. I need to know exactly how many dozens of minutes of vespa usage this is equivalent to per year when taken globally.
Better yet, I need to know how much the global CO2/Water use delta is between the most bloated Linux (mint?) and your average Windows 11 install. Windows 11 phones home for so much bullshit all the time, it'd be good for a laugh.
I'm concerned with the CO2 usage on the constant churn of rebuilding packages, transferring and installing them on all the computers running Arch. I want to know the climate impact of rolling distros!
It should be noted that if the bloat is having to load from said disks frequently, it can lead to premature failure of SSDs, and also if it’s hitting them while you’re trying to load other files, it does also affect performance that way.
But yeah, I’m more concerned with the other resources.
I believe SSD’s don’t actually experience wear when reading data, only when writing. Loading more data from SSD’s shouldn’t cause any premature failure. Overwriting more data each update could cause the drive to fail slightly earlier, but if that’s really that big of a concern, you’d be best of moving to Debian stable (no updates means no SSD writes).
If SSD wear prevention is really that big of a concern, you might be interested in profile-sync-daemon (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Profile-sync-daemon). It reduces writes to hard drives by keeping your browser profile in RAM, and only periodically syncing it to disk.
Though I must add that SSD’s wearing out really isn’t that much of an issue with modern drives. With normal usage, a drive will become obsolete long before it actually wears out.